Chapter I — Dante in His Times
1 The End of the Middle Ages
From Gregory VII. to Frederick II.—The twelfth and thirteenth centuries cover the last and more familiar portion of the Middle Ages. They are the period of chivalry, of the crusades and of romance, when the Neo-Latin languages bore fruit in the prose and poetry of France, the lyrics of the Provençal troubadours, and the earliest vernacular literature of Italy; the period which saw the development of Gothic architecture, the rise of scholastic philosophy, the institution of the Franciscan and Dominican orders, the recovery by western Europe of the works of Aristotle, the elevation of Catholic theology into a systematic harmony of reason and revelation under the influence of the christianised Aristotelianism of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. The vernacular literature of Italy developed comparatively late, and (until the time of Aquinas and Bonaventura) her part in the scholastic movement was secondary to that of France, but she had led the way in the revival of the study of Roman law and jurisprudence, which centred at Bologna, where the great Irnerius taught at the beginning of the twelfth century. It was thus that the first European university, studium generale, came into being, and Bologna boasts the proud title alma mater studiorum.
There are two predominant political factors in Italy which appear at the end of the twelfth century, and hold the field up to the time of Dante’s birth. Out of the war of investitures between Pope and Emperor, the struggle which we associate mainly with the name of Hildebrand (Gregory VII.), emerged the Italian city-states, the free communes of northern and central Italy, whose development culminated in the heroic resistance offered by the first Lombard League to the mightiest of mediaeval German Caesars, Frederick I. (Barbarossa), which won the battle of Legnano (1176) and obtained the peace of Constance (1183). In the south, the Normans—conquering Apulia and Calabria, delivering Sicily from the Saracens—consolidated their rule into a feudal monarchy, making their capital Palermo one of the most splendid cities of the mediaeval world. The third and last of these Norman kings of Sicily, William II. (Par. xx. 61-66), died in 1189. The son of Barbarossa, Henry VI., claimed the kingdom in the right of his wife Constance (Par. iii. 115-120), and established the Suabian dynasty on the throne. His son, Frederick II., continued the cultured traditions of the Norman kings; but the union in his person of the kingdom of Sicily with the Empire led to a continuous struggle with the Italian communes and the Papacy, which embittered his closing years until his death in 1250. The reign of Frederick II. is the period of the Guelf and Ghibelline factions, and the beginning of the rise of tyrants in the Italian cities, tyrants of whom the most terrible example was Ezzelino da Romano (Inf. xii. 110).
The Battle of Benevento.—The policy of Frederick II. was continued by his son Manfred (crowned King of Sicily in 1258), against whom Pope Clement IV., claiming the right to dispose of the kingdom as a fief of the Church, summoned Charles of Anjou, the brother of St. Louis of France. Charles entered Italy (Purg. xx. 67), encountered and defeated Manfred on the plains of Grandella near Benevento, in February 1266, and the papal legate refused the rites of Christian burial to the fallen king (Purg. iii. 124-132). This battle of Benevento marks an epoch in Italian history. It ended for the time the struggle between the Roman Pontiffs and the German Caesars; it initiated the new strife between the Papacy and the royal house of France. Henceforth the old ideal significance of “Guelf” and “Ghibelline,” as denoting adherents of Church and Empire respectively, becomes lost in the local conflicts of each Italian district and city. The imperial power was at an end in Italy; but the Popes, by calling in this new foreign aid, had prepared the way for the humiliation of Pope Boniface at Anagni and the corruption of Avignon. The fall of the silver eagle from Manfred’s helmet before the golden lilies on Charles’s standard may be taken as symbolical. The preponderance in Italian politics had passed back from Germany to France; the influence of the house of Capet was substituted for the overthrown authority of the Emperor (Purg. xx. 43, 44). Three weeks after the battle Charles entered Naples in triumph, King of Apulia and Sicily; an Angevin dynasty was established upon the throne of the most potent state of Italy.
Art and Letters.—This political transformation was profoundly felt in Italian literature. A new courtly poetry, that of the so-called “Sicilian School,” had come into being in the south, partly based on Provençal models, in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Its poets—mainly Sicilians and Apulians, but with recruits from other parts of the peninsula—had almost given to Italy a literary language. “The Sicilian vernacular,” writes Dante in his De Vulgari Eloquentia, “seems to have gained for itself a renown beyond the others; for whatever Italians produce in poetry is called Sicilian, and we find that many native poets have sung weightily.” This he ascribes to the fostering influence of the imperial rule of the house of Suabia: “Those illustrious heroes, Frederick Caesar and his well-begotten son Manfred, showing their nobility and rectitude of soul, as long as fortune lasted, followed human things, disdaining the bestial; wherefore the noble in heart and endowed with graces strove to cleave to the majesty of such great princes; so that, in their time, whatever the excellent among Italians attempted first appeared at the court of these great sovereigns. And, because the royal throne was Sicily, it came about that whatever our predecessors produced in the vernacular is called Sicilian” (V. E. i. 12). The house of Anjou made Naples their capital, and treated Sicily as a conquered province. After Benevento the literary centre of Italy shifted from Palermo and the royal court of the south to Bologna and the republican cities of Tuscany. Guittone d’Arezzo (Purg. xxvi. 124-126) founded a school of Tuscan poets, extending the field of Italian lyrical poetry to political and ethical themes as well as love (which had been the sole subject of the Sicilian School). The beginnings of Italian literary prose had already appeared at Bologna, with the first vernacular models for composition of the rhetoricians, the masters of the ars dictandi. Here, within the next eight years, St. Thomas Aquinas published the first and second parts of the Summa Theologica; and the poetry of the first great singer of modern Italy, Guido Guinizelli (Purg. xxvi. 91-114), rose to spiritual heights undreamed of in the older schools, in his canzone on Love and true nobility: Al cor gentil ripara sempre Amore; “To the gentle heart doth Love ever repair.” And, in the sphere of the plastic arts, these were the years that saw the last triumphs of Niccolò Pisano, “the Father of Sculpture to Italy,” and the earliest masterpieces of Cimabue, the teacher of Giotto (Purg. xi. 94-96), the shepherd boy who came from the fields to free Italian painting from Byzantine fetters, and who “developed an artistic language which was the true expression of the Italian national character.”